Being on this safari was like being transported back into prehistory. In this part of Africa, time has stood still for centuries. And as a first time visitor I was amazed by the beauty of the habitat and the sense of the ancient in everything. Quite a tactile difference compared to my North American home environment of all new concrete and steel.

Each day we set out on to the land in our Jeeps at sunrise and at sunset. These are the times when the animals are moving around. With two cameras in a bag, a proper hat and a cold beer between my legs I was in heaven everyday as we bounced across fields and forest and streams hoping to sneak up on some big animals. And it happened daily.

If you’ve never been on a safari I would recommend making plans now to get it done. Not to be missed!

Dust trails at dusk. A night time safari begins.

Taking a stretch on the road to our eclipse site.

Eclipse day is always the best day! Like my chaser friend, Jeff Collinson, likes to put it, “…it’s like Christmas morning!”

Our observing site, the village of Malambanyama, was a four hour drive from Lusaka that started at 8am. The road looks good in the above picture - but that was the only good spot! The rest was only tolerable because I knew there was a pot of gold waiting for us at our destination. And indeed there was.

One of the best things I have ever been involved with was the presentation of school supplies by our group in exchange for permission to observe the total eclipse from the school’s playground. A poor, rural village, devastated earlier in the year by floods, the Head Master of the school was thrilled to make the arrangement. And they were right in the path of totality - perfect for us. The exercise books, dictionaries, pens and materials will last them ages - and the memories for all of us, a lifetime.

The ceremonial presentation of our gifts is in my video Africa Total Eclipse. Get your copy!

eclipseguy gets video of the school children in song before the eclipse.

A fun thing to do when the partial eclipse has started is to play with projections of the image of the partially eclipsed sun. Projections can be thrown in all sorts of neat ways - with pieces of mirrored glass - with telescopes and binoculars - through bushes and trees and hats - and by punching pinholes in a piece of cardboard. The picture below was made from the lid off my box lunch! All the holes reveal little crescent suns!

Even the smallest pinholes reveal the sun in partial eclipse.

Serious eclipse chasers usually fit into one of two categories. The ones who just want to be there when it happens - to drink-in the sublime beauty of totality - and the ones who are equally serious about taking pictures of it. With totality normally so fleeting you can’t really do both. This is one of the chaser’s inescapable realities. Sometimes a computer can work the camera for you while you watch the sky, but your full attention is still not on the eclipse. I had seen many eclipses without paying much attention to shooting them and I never regretted it. But this time - with totality almost 4 minutes long - I decided to try to do both!

In a playground somewhere in rural Africa I waited for the shadow to come with forty foreign and frantic eclipse chasers, with hundreds of pounds of telescopes, and a few dozen African kids who had never seen such a scene! What a day for all of us!